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Four Lessons From Teaching a Practical Class on SEO (with Slide Deck)

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

I recently had the opportunity to give a lecture on SEO to second year students at Birmingham City University. It was in computer room with every student having access to a computer during the lecture. This gave me the opportunity to get students to actively Google and discuss SERPs, as well as to get students to use some of the tools that form part of our daily routines.

They were about 20 students, a mixture of students from across the BA (Hons) Media & Communications program; a lot of them are web or PR specialists. They had had previous industry lectures so I assumed they would be well prepared for some serious SEO business.

I have included the deck I used (minus a few actual figures) and some of my assumptions and approach for building a deck specifically for an interactive, hands on class on SEO.

Approach

If I spoke about a concept, I wanted to get students to enter a query into Google that showed it in action.

I wanted to use as many concrete examples as possible from brands and companies they know. I am fortunate to have a large client which they are familiar with to use as a case study.

I tried to avoid explanation of detailed SEO technical terms, and rather show them the concepts in action.

I wanted to constantly bring core tenets of SEO back to how it affect them individually and can be used to improve their online presence - asking them how would you use this bit of knowledge or tool to promote yourself or your company.

It's more important to be inspiring than to get every bit of information into their head. Just make sure that they know where to go and get future information if they need it.

I have taken learnings from other lecturers that when teaching, being relevant and personal is key to students understanding.

You will see that I did not want to reinvent the wheel by coming up with my own explanations of introductory SEO concepts and in this case with an audience new to SEO there was really no need. There are a lot of good introductory resources available.

The biggest benefit I could bring in this situation, to show students how the concepts that are familiar to working SEOs (SEO fundamentals pyramid, long tail, video search results etc), was to get students to interact with and apply the learning and processes to their own situations and projects and get their hands dirty doing searches and using tools.

Goals

I wanted them to come away knowing that search is a scientific process. That search can be understood, it can be broken down and it can be replicated. I wanted to get across the principles of goals, measurement, research, planning and execution and show practical examples of each step and the tools that help you along the way.

Delivery

This was my first run of this deck and in this environment; it took about two hours in all. I delivered it all in a two hour burst, which was too long. Energy levels were low and attention was wandering by the end. If I had presented this as a two hour lecture, they would have died of boredom. Getting them interacting and entering and understanding searches on Google is what makes it work.

The deck has a natural break at about an hour, after the general explanations and before the in depth case study. I will definitely split it in half next time.

I will be improving this deck after my first run through and looking for other universities with computer rooms to present at.

I've included various acknowledgements in the notes, you can access those and my (rough) speaking notes by downloading the deck.

I started with some light questions "what's the biggest search engine, what's the second biggest search engine, what's the biggest search engine in China" just to get their minds going and asking questions. I introduced them to mobile growth and gave some pretty amazing growth figures from a real company.

To illustrate viral content I sent them to The Oatmeal. I suggest using Oatmeal as the last one before breaking as students really like it and it can be hard to get attention back from pooping dinosaurs.

I use a private SEO tool from Orchid Box for calculating competitor density - but I couldn't let them use it – it turns out a screen shot of a tool output turns is very boring, I will probably leave it out in future.

I rely a lot on SEOmoz tools, and you will see a lot of screenshots. I had intended to the students all to create accounts and use the tools inside SEOmoz, but it turned out to be too long winded so again I used screenshots and talked through the tools, with the same issue of it being pretty boring.

I mailed Rand afterwards and apparently I could just have let everyone log into my SEOmoz account. I didn't know multiple concurrent logins were possible but I will do that going forward.

For the practical example, I took them through the high level creative advertising concept and showed how all the agencies involved worked together and how the Web Agency and then how SEO fitted into the big picture.

The main chunk of the deck was aimed at showing them how I use goals, measurement, planning, tracking and more on a real client on a real marketing campaign that they will all see in action in a few weeks' time.

I also showed them plan B, what I would do if plan A didn't turn out as expected - buying PPC, rolling out extra paid PR, stepping up tweeting and FB to try affect QDF and the possibility and risks inherent in paid links.

The four main lessons I learned

Split the presentation in half and give students time to breathe and assimilate knowledge.

Work on making the whole presentation more of a story and removing anything that is just cool but doesn't contribute to the story.

Try make sure that students can test and play with everything I show, I won't show screenshots and talk about tools that they can't also use right then and there.

I just wanted to make final note is how rewarding this type of education is. It is very different to standing up and giving a presentation to people who are already familiar with SEO. You can really see the moment someone "gets" the concepts.

You are free to use any of my bits of the deck and I do really suggest you use a relevant example from your own clients. I put in a disclaimer at the start to say please don't share any of the names and numbers I show from real clients, I suggest you do too.

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Having now had a few days to reflect on the presentation, I am considering basing the first half of the presentation solely around a version of the SEO Pyramid to have a stronger central theme throughout. If you teach SEO, please leave some of your tips in the comments

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19 Comments

woo, this caught me a bit by surprise, this post is from a month or two ago :) that session was a great experience

On an education tip tho, I have just handed in my own MA in Social Media final dissertation and have been casting around for a phd. If anyone knows of phd programs in social media or internet marketing please add to the comments (im definitley not looking for traditional marketing phds)

This one says it all: "It's more important to be inspiring than to get every bit of information into their head"

that is the whole point, if we manage to inspire newcommers or our clients to learn about SEO and to think with their heads instead of cramming up all the knowlegde that is out there we can actually teach them something valuable, as they will have a motive to learn.

Also, i agree that shorter presentation with more points and examples are more effective, so you learned something for your next one!

I've always wanted to try my hand at teaching SEO but never hand the chance.

Having been through numerous educational environments, I always think the biggest factor in getting subjects across when teaching, whether they be very new and often technically baffling concepts such as SEO or more creative arty subjects, it is the enthusiasm shown by the teacher that grabs them.

This even extends to conferences. Naming no names, but I have sat through many an SEO talk where the speaker has droned on in a dull monotone voice. While the info may have been of use, I can never concentrate in these situations as my attention is easy stolen away elsewhere!

Get an energetic and passionate speaker up there and I'm with them every step of the way (I hate to be a Rand groupie for the sake of it but I have to concede that he does this very well indeed. Love you Rand).

With SEO probably being something that University students in these situations have never heard of or are not entirely sure as to what it entails, engaging them from the very start is key to enthusing them about the topic.

Half knowledge of SEO is more dangerous than having no clue about what SEO is… and this is the problem with most of the clients today

In my Opinion, Client really need to educate themselves and to be honest we should be the one who should explain then what SEO is before anyone of the non technical SEO fellow came in and say, ‘hey! Buying Links Rocks!,I will keep in touch with you .

SEO is such a mixed evolving bag and requires an ability to adapt to the continually changing technologies, businesses, and culture. A good opening line to a course on SEO to second year College students could be, "Everything I say today will not be precise, if not completely outdated, by the time you graduate."

I have done a few SEO training classes for guys and girls who do not know any thing about SEO. I used some similar slides to you but probably more graphical based.

You really need to keep the presentation below 1 hour and 30 minutes and try and have question time too, I know people will really tend to drift off if you get technical so try and keep them happy with cup cakes or something similar =)

The way they do it at BCU is an hour, then a break for coffee, then another hour, then coffee again and then the senior lecturer takes a 30 min talk with the class about what they learnt from the hands on session to help cement the learning

Its a different experience to training people in companies (like people in a traditional marketing department), these are young, enthusiastic tech savvy guys who want to learn about their industry - I think it gives them a bit of a better attention span ^^

Its definetly a long time, the fact that they do work themselves on their pcs as you go breaks it up well tho and I was fielding questions throughout.

great post! I've done some SEO training in the past and found a couple of things.

1. Everyone tends to know something about SEO and most of it tends to be very wrong and sometimes out-dated by about 8 years!

2. There is so much to share that you just can't hope teach SEO in a classroom.

I totally agree with what you say about focusing more on inspiration. i really aim to help people to learn and discover for themselves and use their preconceptions about SEO as an icebreaker and an introduction to kickstart the process. And of course SEOmoz is a top recommendation for learning!

This is great info. I know seomoz is based in Seattle as is the company I work for. Do you know of any local classes similar to yours that I could take locally? Does SEO offer a practical class (would initially prefer to learn hands on in a classroom atmosphere and obtain further resources online after).

Let me know if you can point me in the right directions. Thanks in advance.

Wow! That was great! Thank you for sharing! I have some SEO classes comming up in the next few weeks. I hope to incorporate some of the information you shared. I'll let you know how it goes! Again, thank you for sharing this!

Ho yeah! What a nice informational post! I will indeed have some "information session" coming in a near futur and was wondering "where to start" and "how to start". Making people interact "live" is a great idea. They could "touch and feel" live what your explaining. I'll be using some tips you gave here for myself. Thanks for that.

Your final words caught my attention "I just wanted to make final note is how rewarding this type of education is. It is very different to standing up and giving a presentation to people who are already familiar with SEO. You can really see the moment someone "gets" the concepts." yep! Well this is one of the rewarding "pay" of the whole concept of teaching when you "love" what you do! This very moment when you get to see that you've just actually "pass your passion" to someone else! Wow great feeling.